Hitler Youth: A Primary Cultural Agent for the Nazi Party

The entirety of the Holocaust was precipitated by a hard-line ideological predisposition toward German nationalism, at least as such a concept was defined by the National Socialist Party. Though World War II and the upswing of Hitler and the Nazi regime are events which revolved around military confrontations and international proxy battling, the European continent played host to a far more unconventional wartime operation. As the Nazi party portrayed it to a surprisingly receptive population, the quest for German national pride and success was to be defined not simply by victorious emergence from the war but by a purification of the people. While this provided an impetus for the larger war, wherein conquered nations would undergo a cultural Germanification, it was also the theoretical basis for the nefarious plans for which Hitler had begun to lay the groundwork even before the complete inception of war. Herein was the primary justification for the extermination of various groups of impure ethnicities which compromised the nation’s strength. In the midst of a devastating economic depression, and seized by the promises of Hitler’s dramatic subversion of the ineffective central leadership in parliament, the German people actively embraced the scapegoating which was directed toward a number of groups, most specifically the Jews. Ultimately sending to their deaths 6 million Jews and 5 million more of assorted ethnicity or crime, the Nazis succeeded in weaving through the German psyche a culture of acceptance for the rightness of the ‘final solution’ that called for the full genocide of the Jews. Of primary importance in facilitating this final solution would be the indoctrination of a population with the ideologies of false nationalism, ethnic hatred and physical purity, particularly by way a most susceptible and simultaneously strong demographic. The youth of Germany and conquered parts of Europe would be a key to the psychological success of the Nazi party in establishing its occupation and expansion. The Hitler Youth would become a central part of the Nazi perpetration of the vast crimes committed against Germany, Europe and humanity.

Within the context of the civilian population, the Hitler Youth would become the champions of the Nazi ideology, becoming a particularly violent and gang-oriented presence in German society. In this regard, the Hitler Youth would be something of an enforcement agency with primarily cultural and social outlets. To this point, from no lesser source than Adof Hitler himself would the Hitler Youth receive its directives of character and purpose. Speaking on the subject in 1933, the Fuehrer would evoke the imagery today associated with the so-called Aryan race in the indoctrination of his young followers. He declared that “my program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes…That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication…That is how I will create the New Order.” (HP, 1) In no uncertain terms, Hitler reports that he is building a force of rabid devotees and churning out the soldiers of a future German empire.

It can be seen as no mystery, therefore, that the members of the Hitler Youth who did ascend the ranks and achieve a level of loyalty to the party would be among the fiercest defenders of the Third Reich. Hitler’s treatment of the youth and his intense focus on this as a primary arm of operation for the Nazi party would demonstrate an awareness of the susceptibility of this population to such molding. The idea of creating a young generation of Aryan supermen fed into the creation of a new German mythology — a key feature of Nazi distortion and propaganda. The inexperience and vulnerability of youth to indoctrination meant that quite a great number of Germany’s youth would become easy fodder for the fabrication of a convenient German history and nationalistic identity.

So is this underscored again by Hitler’s rhetoric, this time before a vast multitude at a 1934 Nuremberg rally. Here, Hitler declares that “we do not want this nation to become soft. Instead, it should be hard and you will have to harden yourselves while you are young. You must learn to accept deprivations without ever collapsing. Regardless of whatever we create and do, we shall pass away, but in you, Germany will live on and when nothing is left of us you will have to hold up the banner which some time ago we lifted out of nothingness. And I know it cannot be otherwise because you are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, and your young minds are filled with the same will that dominates us. You cannot be but united with us. And when the great columns of our movement march victoriously through Germany today I know that you will join these columns. And we know that Germany is before us, within us, and behind us.” (HP, 1) Connecting the Hitler Youth to this ideal of carrying on a nation’s heritage and pure bloodline would be a key part of the creation of a mythology to which the Hitler Youth could achieve a deep psychological connection. This would prove markedly effective for producing devoted followers and eventual elite recruits into the various corps of the German military.

To the point, this attention to the advancement of the youth movement would not be an afterthought but a mission of fundamental importance to the Nazi Party as a whole. In fact, to the perspective of many, this was a primary avenue to the realization of Hitler’s cause, with German youth proving especially ready to accept the patronage of the draconian Nazi party. As Kater (2004) tells, “while Hitler appeared to many young people as the father or older brother they had never had or had already lost, the Nazi movement, with all its factions, was coming across to many as a party made for youth. Its visible formations in the street seemed to be young — the SA, the SS, and the Nationalist Socialist Student League, which from bastions in the universities had acted as a vanguard of Nazism in Germany’s educated middle class since the mid-1920s.” (Kater, 10)

This history of recruitment amongst elites in the party meant that the Hitler Youth had already proven by the prime years of the war to be an ideal way both to develop members of the German military, especially its upper echelons, and to develop its own roles in strengthening the party on a local level. To many of the members of German society who wished to resist the aims and conditioning of the Nazi Party, the Hitler Youth would become a fearsome vision of the future of the country. Contrary to older generations of Germans, members of the Hitler Youth tended to have been born of come of age in the midst of the dominance of the Third Reich. Thus, there was a lesser tendency amongst youth to put up any rational, practical or psychological resistance to the tenets of National Socialism. The ethically objectionable nature of such principles as violent nationalism, racial purification and pointed Anti-Semitism would not register as such to those raised in a context without critical reflection on these ideas and practices. The enthusiasm shown by the German youth would be facilitated by the fact that most had never known a time when Hitler’s ideas and policies did not define Germany. As Kater indicates, “above all, the members of the Nazi Party themselves were visibly young, with a mean age of approximately thirty-one for all new joiners in the period from 1925 to 1932.” (Kater, 10)

This demonstrates the importance of the Hitler Youth to the evolution of the party from organizational proliferation to outright cultural, political and military domination of German and European society. In a manner that aligned with its general efficiency at permeating all aspects of German society, the Nazi party would find a youth disenchanted by the low standard of living and eroded sense of pride in the pre-Nazi German society and would exploit its desire to belong to something powerful and unified. The Hitler Youth reflected all the cultural, hierarchical and political aspects of the larger Nazi Party, including its identifying traits of radical nationalism, coercive mob tactics and an absence of intellectual scrutiny. Indeed, this latter trait is one which emphasized in the training regiment for the Nazi party. This was driven by physical and athletic rigor, the reinforcement of National Socialist ideologies, education in the myths of Nazi heritage and emergence in the propaganda of the party. (HBU1, 1)

Essentially, the movement had all the makings of an recruitment agency for future soldiers, beginning with the creation of the ideal psychological and physical prototype for service to the Aryan race. Accordingly “the Hitler Youth movement emphasized activism, physical training, NAZI ideology, especially nationalism and racial concepts, and absolute obedience to Hitler and the NAZI Party. Indoctrinating children in National Socialist ideology was a key goal of the NAZI Party. Once Hitler assumed control over the German state, he used the Government to make the Hitler Youth the country’s all encompassing youth movement” (HBU1, 1) The racial elements of the Hitler Youth indoctrination were also of critical importance to the Nazi movement as these propelled the aggressive social isolation and abuse of groups such as Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. The Hitler Youth would gain a sense of pride in the propaganda designed to project them as the future leaders of Germany. Essentially granted the right to defy those of any age who differed with the party’s values, the Hitler Youth would be primed for a distinct level of enthusiasm based on this empowerment. In their numbers and the encouragement provided them to ‘enforce’ Nazi views on racial disparity, the members of the Hitler Youth would achieve a certain status of importance in the party that preyed on their collective level of psychological commitment. The party thrived on the level of dedication and outright cruelty of which the youth movement was uniquely capable.

In fact, there is a perspective which holds that the Hitler Youth was among the most successful avenues for the realization of Hitler’s vision. Certainly the pace and scale of its growth in numbers would be demonstrative of this claim, with the organization originally founded in 1922, disbanded with Hitler’s temporary imprisonment in 1926, and revitalized during the onset of Hitler’s attainment of total power in Germany. It was at this juncture that the Hitler Youth would begin an intense campaign to prove itself that top group amongst the many Nazi oriented youth groups vying for favor with the new state authorities. None would be so successful of the Hitler Youth, who gradually gained the support and favoritism of Hitler himself. As the HBU tells, “the Hitler Youth grew from a group with a handful of boys to one of the most important uniformed youth group in Europe. No group so thoroughly suceeded in their stated purpose. Had the NAZIs succeeded, the elite of Europe would have been raised and trained through the Hitler Youth. Membership increased from about 1,000 boys in 1923 to nearly 8 million in 1939 when Hitler launched World War II.” (HBU1, 1)

In this way, the Nazi Party used the Hitler Youth as a way to proceed toward an projected plan of continental and global domination in which the generation of emergent leaders would have been raised ensconced in Nazi ideals, training and propaganda exposure. Kater shows how this would produce not only a sense of dedication to the cause but a sense of ownership for its values and goals. For the members of the Hitler Youth, there was an impression that they were being primed to lead the New Order upon its emergence. In a sense, these was a shared belief produced by heavy indoctrination that they would eventually be handed the keys to the kingdom as it were. To the point, Kater would indicate that “most Hitler Youths in the fold loved its program of activities and did feel looked after, knowing that they would graduate to become bearers of the new Reich. From their subjective point-of-view, the sentiments of belonging, of sharing, of being willing to follow orders from tough but caring leaders, were very real. It is against this backdrop of a broad and general consensus among youth in Nazi German that exceptions and inconsistencies must be judged.” (Kater, 15)

Like many of the movements associated with Nazism at that time, the Hitler Youth would only gradually attain a clear affiliation with the tenets of the Nazi party. In its initial phases, it was only one of many groups with ties to socialism and to a desire for greater national pride. But perhaps the cause for its elevation above many of its competitors was the degree of admiration which the group’s founder held for Hitler. Kater tells that “the youth group was initiated by Kurt Gruber, a law student and admirer of Hitler from Plauen in Saxony, home to many blue-collar workers. Thus the beginnings of the Nazi youth affiliate were in the proletarian realm, and at least until Hitler’s takeover in 1933, the groups emphasized their working-class mystique.” (Kater, 16) It was only a matter of time however before the Hitler Youth become important and prominent among middle and upper class Germans as well. For the young members of German society, the organization offered a chance to join the push for change in an otherwise bleak economic era. The failures of the Weimar Republic that had alienated so many educated members of Germany’s youth population were producing a greater push by those with career aspirations, interests in political change and desires for the growth of industry toward membership in the Hitler Youth. Though at first Hitler would only casually voice his support for the Hitler Youth — based on the fact that as youths they did no possess the right to vote in German elections — his eventual ascendance to power in 1933 would produce a totally different perspective on the importance of German youth activities.

It was at this juncture that the state would begin to produce its own standards and regulatory oversight for the group, giving prelude to its adoption as a state-sponsored organization. Simultaneously, it would achieve ever greater levels of social penetration with its elevated stature in the new power structure. Thus, its age of recruitment was lowered to expand its general reach. Therefore, “by the end of 1930, the age range for the HJ of both genders was from ten to eighteen. In October 1931, Baldur von Schirach was appointed by Hitler as chief of all the youth activities for the NSDAP. Schiarch had led the Nazi University Student League since 1928, as well as the Nazi Pupils’ League . . . In 1931 the HJ already had close to 35,000 members, which still comprised about 69% young workers, 12% pupils, and 10% white-collar shop clerks.” (Kater, 17-18) With respect to the motives drives these populations of young Germans toward membership in the Nazi party, Kater acknowledges that during the reigning Great Depression gripping the global working population, roughly half of all Nazi youth parents were struggling with unemployment at this juncture. Here we can see that as with adults in Germany and throughout Europe, for younger members of the party the state of the German economy was a primary impetus.

Hitler’s rise to power in the German government was one prompted by crisis to begin with. Like much of the world in the 1930s, Germany was drowning in an economic depression that completely devalued the German dollar, had thrown masses into joblessness and poverty and had proved the German government of Bismarck to be a fully impotent one. It was in this vacuum of effective leadership and long-term resolution that Hitler emerged as a man possessing of power. Proud Germans, perhaps more driven by their nation’s storied technological and philosophical developments than restrained by them, were desperate to associate their beloved motherland with power and prominence again. In all of Hitler’s words, this promise permeated effectively. It found the most resonance perhaps with the young citizens of Germany, who were most concerned with the nature of their future. If Germany was to be returned to its former glory, Hitler promised, the enemies of the German people would have to be vanquished. This meant not only extending the sway of German nationalism to eastern Europe and eventually the world but it also meant addressing impurities to German strength within her own borders. Here, the Jews and other ethnic others served as the ideal shoulderer of blame. While Hitler may have exacted his plan on the basis of ideological self-assuredness, he implemented it with a strict adherence to principles of propaganda. The ideology came a distant second to the mass-marketing of deception regarding the Jews and targeted directly at the average German. The youth movement was proving itself most susceptible to the interests of shifting blame.

Where the themes of racial hierarchy were projected as having significant importance to the Nazi cause, the Hitler Youth were especially well-suited to enforcing the beliefs related to ethnic purification. As Kater tells, “it was one of the great propaganda achievements of the Nazi rulers that they were able to offer a political and ideological world view that granted status, certainty and power to young people, so much so that teenagers of both genders could accept and abide by the prescribed behaviors with hardly any qualms. Through the elaborate propaganda process and its propagation of racial theory and the superiority of the Volk, Hitler was able to shape private and public behavior as well as reinforce public support of the Nazi regime and the people’s intimate ties to him, their Fuhrer. Young people, with their ideals and energies, would have been especially vulnerable to such values in their own search for identity and meaning.” (Kater, 4)

This search would be hijacked by a moment in history in which their affiliation with the Nazi Party was simply a matter of inevitability. With the progression of the war, the Hitler Youth would mature to take on greater and more dangerous war-time responsibilities. Though the emergence of the Hitler Youth in particular would not be planned, and would instead occur somewhat organically and in concert with Hitler’s own rise to power, it would ultimately come to reflect one of Hitler’s stating goals and ambitions. To his way of thinking, it was the youth movement which would demonstrate the greatest capacity to help Germany face up to the difficult and ugly challenges which Hitler had projected for it. If he meant for the youth of Germany to become cannon folder for the war effort, he supported this ambition with the argument that the youth of Germany were to be trained to face death with readiness and a desire to be martyred for the survival of Germany. Hitler also perceived that the youth were something of a clean slate upon which to draw the plans for the future of Germany, as opposed to those adults tainted and softened by years under the ineffectual Weimar Republic. To this point, Rempel (1991) reports that “from the start of his political career in Munich after World War I to the final bizarre moments in his Berlin bunker, Hitler was obsessed with youth as a political force in history. He expressed it dramatically to Hermann Rauschning in 1933: ‘I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up . . . We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them I can make a new world.’ He went on to draw a stark and primitive picture of ‘a violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth’ from which he rightfully though the world would ‘shrink back.'” (Rempel, 1-2)

Quite indeed, the force would prove both formidable and instrumental to the creation of a monstrous and terrible Germany. If the tenets of German National Socialism were not terrifying enough on their own, Hitler created a nightmarish scenario in which these horrific policies and acts were to be unofficially enforced by a youth movement with all the vitality and power to reign destruction on those who would resist and yet possessing none of the intellectual or philosophical instruments to consider their own forms of resistance.

As the war would progress and the military needs of the Germans would grow more dire, the Hitler Youth would prove ready for participation in the war itself. First in combat support roles and eventually as tank division combatants at key sites such as the beaches of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, the poorly trained young soldiers would be fed into a mass casualty scenario but would enter it with the intrepid brutality and commit for which it was trained. The members of the Hitler Youth would gain a reputation for pitching some of the most aggressive and terrible tactics of the war while on the battlefield.

To this end, some disagreement would persist in the years immediately after the war as many former members of the Hitler Youth were allowed to escape punishment or even critical scrutiny for their role in the war. This is even in spite of the fact that many members of the Hitler Youth were known to have displayed some of the most virulent support for the cause and were identified as having committed crimes against humanity in their various combat duties during the later part of the war. But because all evidence suggests that membership in these youth chapters was compulsory, even necessary for individual survival, youth members would almost never be tried for their participation in the war effort.

An example from recent history demonstrates the complexity of this approach however. With respect to the current pope of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger, many have cited his membership both in the Hitler Youth and in the German Airforce thereafter as a major strike against his qualifications for the papacy. And yet, defenders of the Bavarian born pope maintain that as a child, he was a victim of compulsory membership. An article from The New York Times (2005) confirms these claims, indicating that “some 80 to 90% of Germans joined the Hitler Youth and refusing to sign up could mean being sent to a youth ‘reeducation camp,’ akin to a concentration camp, said Volker Dahm, director of Nazi-era research for Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History. ‘You could try to avoid it but it was very, very difficult,’ Dahm said. ‘It was a bit easier to avoid it if you lived in a big city where you could hide yourself in the crowd, but in the countryside it was nearly impossible because everyone knew you.'” (AP, 1)

It was thus that the current pope and many other individuals with ethical or political reasons to differ from the Nazis had no other choice but to enter into the ranks of the Hitler Youth. The article indicates that many groups of religious, civic or political affiliation were simply assimilated into the Hitler Youth as the war progressed. The exponential growth of its membership would be a function of its dissolution of the Catholic group of which Ratzinger was a member and myriad other groups of their own distinct heritage and tradition.

Most notable amongst these would be the Boys Scouts of Germany, who in spite of a tradition positive civic association, would be a target of Hitler’s mandatory recruitment efforts. As the HBU (1998) tells, “with the coming to power of the NAZIs in 1933, the Scouts and almost all other competing youth groups were abolished and boys had to join the Hitler Youth. Only after the defeat of the NAZIs in 1945 were the Scouts allowed to reorganize in Germany.” (HBU, 1) This is a demonstration of the distortion reflected by the numerical ranks of the Hitler Youth, which by the peak of the war suggested the majority population of German youth to be devoted party members. Indeed, it was the most important avenue for indoctrination for a future generation of intended leaders.

As a result, it is difficult to assess the activities and behaviors of the members of the Hitler youth with any kind of meaningful ethical scrutiny. To be certain, in most instances evidence suggests that the Hitler Youth were an important and central part of creating a society and culture where ethnic hatred was encouraged, violent outing of political enemies was expected and devoted commitment to the cause was required. For those that would find resonance in the ideals of Nazism, the Hitler Youth was an entryway into the doctrines, policies and values of the movement. For those that would aspire to resistance, the Hitler Youth would become an extremely threatening presence, often working as the ears, eyes and arms of a larger Nazi Party.

The true danger of the Hitler Youth movement would never be fully realized. As the account states, the degree to which the indoctrination was designed to provoke commitment to a coming New Order was to indicate that in the immediate future of German rulership, the youth would be given the utmost of authority. The training and ideological education provided to the Hitler Youth was constructed to realize a master-race theory which drove much of the racialist policy underscoring Nazi crimes against humanity.

But in their own very direct way, the members of the Hitler Youth would take their responsibilities during the war very seriously, constituting a core of leadership with a significant impact on the behavior and morale of the whole population. In each of the young devotees to Hitler’s movement would be a direct reflection of the Fuhrer himself, brimming with the hatred, ambition and misdirected nationalist pride that defined the Nazis and their horrible movement.

Works Cited:

Associated Press (AP). (2005). New Pope Defied Nazis As Teen During WWII. The New York Times. Online at http://bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/texts/cjrelations/topics/new_pope_defied_nazis.htm

The History Place (HP). (1999). The History Place: Hitler Youth. Historyplace.com.

Historical Boys’ Uniform (HBU). (1998). German Boys Scouts/Pfadfinderen. Historical Boys’ Clothing. Online at http://histclo.com/Youth/youth/org/sco/country/ger/scoutger.ht

Historical Boys’ Uniform (HBU1). (1998). Hitler Youth. Historical Boys’ Clothing. Online at http://histclo.com/Youth/youth/org/nat/hitler/hitler.htm

Kater, M.H. (2004). Hitler Youth. Harvard University Press.

Rempel, G. (1991). Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS. The University of North Carolina Press.